This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Chlorine gas killing kids video horrifies UN

Two hours after UN saw video of children suffering from gas warfare, there were reports of more chlorine bombs dropped in Syria’s Idlib province.

Dr. Annie Sparrow, here in Toronto in October, has worked with Syrian doctors travelling often to Syria’s border in Turkey, and has urged the UN to act, at the very least to establish no-bombing zones. (Carlos Osorio / The Toronto Star)

US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power described the closed-door meeting where the United Nations Security Council watched a video of attempts to resuscitate children poisoned in a chlorine gas attack as “extremely unusual and very, very emotional.”
(Lauren Victoria Burke / The Associated press)

A young man breathes with an oxygen mask at a clinic in the Syrian village of Sarmin on March 17, following reports of suffocation cases related to an alleged Assad regime gas attack in the area. (MOHAMAD ZEEN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES file photo)

Dr. Mohammed Tennari returns to Syria this week after 15 days in the U.S., lobbying congressmen and diplomats and bringing members of the United Nations Security Council to tears with his testimony.

He is a radiologist, not a politician or an activist or even an eager spokesperson for the horrors he has witnessed in Syria. But after months of watching children in his field hospital die from chlorine gas attacks, he says he feels compelled to do something.

There is no question his trip helped raise awareness, but he worries that’s all it did.

“They showed a lot of empathy. They were very affected when they saw the video,” he said about the Security Council members’ reaction to footage of the chlorine gas victims. “It’s good to see them shed tears. But I wish people would reflect this empathy with action.”

Article Continued Below

The video shot at his field hospital in the village of Sarmin following the March 16 chlorine gas attack is difficult to watch. Six members of the Taleb family — whom Tennari personally knew, including Aisha, 3, Sarah, 2, and 1-year-old Muhammad — all died that night and dozens of others were injured.

“The symptoms were chest tightness, burning sensation in the throat and burning eyes,” Tennari had told the Toronto Star by Skype a day after helicopters dropped the barrel bombs filled with chlorine.

Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, described the closed-door meeting with Tennari to journalists as “extremely unusual and very, very emotional.”

“The video, in particular, of the attempts to resuscitate the children — if there was a dry eye in the room, I didn’t see it. It was — it’s just devastating to see the facts of what this regime is doing,” she said, according to a transcript of her remarks. “(E)very Council member prefaced what they said by saying, ‘Forgive me if I don’t use diplomatic language, but I am so moved and so overwhelmed by what I have seen,’ and then they proceeded with their comments.”

But two hours after Tennari testified at the UN there were reports of more chlorine bombs dropped in Syria’s Idlib province. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has stated that they had a “high degree of confidence” that chlorine had been unleashed on three villages in northern Syria last year, urging that those responsible be brought to justice.

“The UN Security Council made a decision to prohibit using chlorine gas in Syria,” Tennari said in a phone interview from West Virginia Saturday. “I wish at least they would apply that.”

There is terrorism and then there is state terrorism. The end result is the same, fear and death, but the reaction rarely is.

The U.S. and allied countries have accused President Bashar Assad’s regime of using these chlorine-filled bombs and Canada co-sponsored the UN resolution that prohibits its use as a weapon of war. Power noted after Tennari’s presentation, “only the Assad regime has helicopters.”

And yet with no way to independently verify who is responsible, since the borders are closed and the regime has blocked access, no official blame has been assigned.

Russia, a Security Council member, says there is insufficient evidence that the Syrian government is behind the attacks.

Tennari said he met with Russian diplomats while in Washington. “I asked if you’re not going to change your politics, could you help provide humanitarian aid to the Syrian people by putting pressure on the regime to stop bombing schools, hospitals and civilians.”

“They did not reject it directly, but at the same time they did not accept it,” he said. “They said they would consider it.”

New York pediatrician and public health advocate Annie Sparrow, who has worked with Syrian doctors travelling often to Syria’s border in Turkey, has urged the UN to act, at the very least to establish no-bombing zones. “These obscene breaches of humanity certainly calls for some response rather than simply tears,” she said in an interview this week. “I obsess about trying to find ways to try to make it meaningful for people,”

Sparrow criticizes the double standard of world leaders who react to the violence perpetrated by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL), but seemingly turn a blind eye to the regime’s war crimes.

“Assad has this simplistic method of denial, denial, denial, and of course, we’re distracted by the brutality of ISIS and density of bloodshed, the beheadings, the executions, even though the death they’ve caused is microscopic compared to the wholesale suffering and misery Assad has caused,” she said.

Sparrow writes in the The New York Review of Books this month about the “cruel irony” of the Assad regime using chlorine as a weapon, when for years it was withheld, as a health aid, from opposition regions.

“For several years before the beginning of the popular uprising in March 2011, and in part contributing to it, the Syrian government denied many public health measures to areas of the country that were politically unsympathetic to it, selectively withholding not only chlorine for treatment of water contaminated by sewage, but also routine childhood vaccinations,” Sparrow writes.

“Having made civilians in opposition-held areas suffer from the lack of chlorine, the Syrian government is now, in a cruel irony, making it suffer from too much chlorine — in the form of chemical weapons.”

Following the August 2013 massacre when 1,400 civilians were killed by missiles loaded with sarin, the Assad regime agreed to destroy much of its chemical arsenal in a deal negotiated by Russia and the U.S.

However, chlorine, a legitimate substance used in industry that is easy to make, was not included.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com